Catch a snooze during the unoriginal 'Dreamcatcher'

Friday, March 21, 2003

By WILLIAM ARNOLD
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER MOVIE CRITIC

Lawrence Kasdan's ambitious but overblown and ultimately rather silly film version of Stephen King's "Dreamcatcher" plays like a sci-fi/horror version of "The Hours." It's made up of three intercut stories that remain more or less independent of each other until the very end.

MOVIE REVIEW

DREAMCATCHER

DIRECTOR: Lawrence Kasdan

CAST: Morgan Freeman, Thomas Jane, Jason Lee

RUNNING TIME: 136 minutes

RATING: R for violence, gore and language

WHERE: Alderwood 7, Cinema 17, Crossroads 8, Everett 9, Factoria, Galaxy Tacoma 6, Galleria 11, Gateway 8, Issaquah 9, Longston Place 14, Marysville Cinema 14, Meridian 16, Metro, Monroe 12, Mountlake 9, Oak Tree, Parkway Plaza 12, Redmond Town Center, Woodinville 12

GRADE: C-

Story No.1 is a cabin-fever thriller, which owes a lot to the Kubrick film version of King's "The Shining," and deals with four longtime best friends who find themselves snowbound in the Maine woods and besieged by sinister occult forces.

Story No. 2 is a coming-of-age drama, which owes a lot to the Rob Reiner film version of King's "Stand by Me," and deals with the same four friends 20 years earlier, when they save a mentally challenged younger boy from a gang of bullies.

Story No. 3 is an Earth vs. the aliens action movie, which owes a lot to King's "The Stand" (who says the master doesn't recycle his own stories?) and deals with a demented general (Morgan Freeman) waging a secret war with invading monsters from outer space.

On one level, Kasdan and screenwriter William Goldman aim high, with a demanding story structure, lots of spooky atmosphere and some imaginative computer-generated creature effects (which the script is honest enough to slyly admit have been borrowed from "Alien").

But on another level, the movie aims very low, with scene after scene loaded down with annoyingly unfunny and intrusive locker-room dialogue, and so many flatulence, scatology and castration gags that you feel as if you've wandered into "Scary Movie III."

The result is an uneasy mix that's too long, too confusing and too undramatically paced to be consistently gripping, and so blatantly panders to teenagers that it seems pathetic coming from filmmakers as distinguished as Kasdan ("Body Heat") and the multi-Oscar-winning Goldman.